Jay Lake - Endurance

The hit had almost been easy. The effort and thrill put a bounce into my step. My spoils safely tucked away, I patted the baby bulging ever more and hummed a happy tune until I’d reached the Temple Quarter.

Sometimes, it was good just to be at work.

Marya’s ruined temple was even more forlorn under the night’s slush and ice. Older snow had lingered here as well, now glazed in glittering, frigid armor. Ragged offerings of food and children’s clothing had been scattered by weather, dogs, and scavengers. The place had already taken on the air of a midden.

I climbed over the masonry chunk that had hosted me before and leaned against it. From one of my robe’s inner pockets I removed some of the jewels, along with the flower and the silken smallclothes, and laid them out before me. Desire was a woman’s goddess. Her greatest power lay within Her name. I had before me the conventional trappings of desire-wealth, beauty, sex.

To that, I added three drops of blood squeezed from a tiny cut in the ball of my right thumb. The goddess Desire had sought my service, had looked to elevate me through a private theophany. I was Her object of desire.

“You are everywhere women can be found,” I said to the empty air. “You have been drawn to me as a bee is drawn to a new blossom.” At my feet, the blood stained the dirty snow a strange crimson-black. “You asked something of me, and I refused. Now I would ask something of You, for You to refuse or not as it pleases You.”

My only answer was the wind, which blew heavy and damp. A cat trotted across a nearby roof. It spared me a single, incurious glance. Even the birds had given up on the day, hiding wherever it was they went when the weather grew too raw to contemplate.

I stared at my offerings. A few green shoots poked frosty-tipped through the snow. Had they been present moments ago when I’d arrived at this place?

That made no sense.

Then I noticed the metal tang of the snow in my mouth. No, not the snow. The divine.

I looked up to see a woman looking back at me. Soulful eyes, hair that had been flowing until someone had hacked at it. With a start, I recognized her. The wounded priestess I’d rescued from this temple on its destruction.

What was her name…? Laria? Raisa?

Laris.

“You are not the goddess,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.

“Do not be so certain.” The voice was human this time, without that world-spanning scale of the divine I’d previously heard in Desire’s words. But her eyes were doors into other years, longer than any human life could encompass.

“Welcome.” I made my tone as simple as possible. “I am shamed that I did not know You.”

“You did not know my vessel,” Desire said. “Though you should have.”

“Yes.” I could give no more answer than that.

“You were told I would not make my offer again.”

My head tilted back. I could not swallow down all of my pride. “I do not return to petition for Your offer.”

Amusement, now, and a hint of the horizon-wide divine even in this woman’s voice. “You would bargain with me? You truly are one of my daughters.”

“A great-granddaughter, at the most,” I replied. “But I come to tell You something, and ask You a thing in return for that gift of knowledge. I know who slew Marya. They aim to destroy more gods and goddesses. Blackblood here in Copper Downs. Then Your daughter the Lily Goddess in Kalimpura, to my certain understanding. They will shake the foundations of the world to serve their petty interests.” And their petty god, I thought, whoever he might be, but I was not prepared to say that aloud.

She regarded me for a long, slow moment. Even in those human eyes, Her regard was a smoldering light that should have burned my skin from my flesh and my flesh from my bones. Then: “What of it?”

This was my moment, my time to reach for the entire prize. “If I tell You all, will You lend Your titanic might to stand against the agents of destruction here, before they can move on?”

The priestess reached a hand for me. In that instant, I saw not a woman’s palm but something huge, the size of countries, with a map of all our lives graven upon it. I quailed to be struck down then and there with no more purpose to my life than what I’d brought to this meeting with the goddess.

But Her fingers rested on my arm. A deep spark passed through me, finding its way to the earth at my feet. Everything was warm, then hot, then screaming pain, then normal once more.

If you were truly one of My daughters, Desire said, with more of that soul-crushing sadness I’d heard before, you would tell Me this thing and hold no hostages at all in the bargaining.

Now Her voice had taken on that bone-wrenching solidity. Somewhere I found the strength to stand before this goddess. “I am a woman. But I am not Yours. Otherwise I would have taken Your offer. This is why I present a bargain between us rather than an offering.”

Another of those long, slow goddess-smiles. You misunderstand so much.

“I misunderstand everything far too often.” My baby moved within my belly, until I rested my hands there and calmed her. Something caught at my eye. I glanced away from the goddess Desire for a moment to see one of the twins’ chalk marks high on a ruined wall, glowing with a faint spark.

With a dizzying suddenness, the true plot that was afoot became clear to me.

“You,” I whispered in a slowly dawning horror. My gut threatened to spew. “They are hunting You.” Surali might be playing a game of cities, but the twins were playing a much deeper game of time. And the fall of a titanic now, this titanic, would betray women across the plate of the world.

Now you begin to see it.

Someone nearby shouted. The voice caught at me. What would happen next? “I have been the bait in a trap for You,” I told the goddess, almost driven to my knees by my sense of loathing for myself, for the enormity in play. “I have led them to You.”

Green, the goddess replied gently. I have been pursued across all the time of this world. They slay My daughters for the same reason one might kill the priests of a god: to weaken Me. Always I raise more daughters, but always they take from Me.

Another shout. Was that a chase, coming closer? “I am ashamed of my bargain now,” I blurted. “Watch for the twins, Iso and Osi. They may be with the Rectifier. But remove Yourself.”

I cannot. The woman whose body the goddess had inhabited sagged so suddenly that I was forced to leap to catch her before she collapsed upon the ground. Once more merely human, she tried to stand. I could feel the weakness in her, as if all her power had fled with her patroness.

“We must move on swiftly,” I whispered, my lips so close to her ear I might have kissed her.

The woman looked at me, her eyes soft and brown, pain lines etched upon her freckled face. “Leave,” she said in a quiet voice.

“Not without you.” Having rescued Laris once, I could not abandon her this time. Though she was most of a foot taller than me, I swung her arm across my shoulder and walked her away like a Blade aspirant being taken drunkenly to a corner sleeping mat.

Whatever the noise behind us, it did not catch up before we found a new alley in which to hide.

I sat her down on a bale of rotten straw that had been discarded behind some temple stable. The stuff stank, and was sticky with brownish rot, but it was relatively warm, sheltered under the eaves. The furred, thick scent of horses filled the air around us. Their nearby whickering served as counterpoint to our conversation.

“I know who you are,” I said, bending low. “Laris. Priestess of Marya.”

She nodded, eyes bright with tears. Or possibly fear.